Information-centric networking for M2M communications

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) recently released a set of specifications for a reference architecture to globally access resources provided by machines over heterogeneous technologies in an interoperable way through a RESTful interface. Resources are named through Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) at the application layer and typically reachable at the network layer through IP connectivity. Such an approach can be used also to access extremely resource-constrained devices, provided that lightweight interactions with a gateway, remotely exposing their resources, are granted. Among potential alternatives to support communication between the gateway and such constrained devices, we investigate the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm, gaining momentum in the future Internet research arena. It differs from the host-centric IP networking in that it cares for the content to retrieve instead of the device hosting it. By directly using content names at the network layer and a receiver-driven communication, ICN well fits the requirements of many machine-to-machine (M2M) applications that are information-centric in nature and rely on a publish-subscribe service model.In this paper, we propose an ICN-based solution to be deployed on top of constrained devices whose named resources are exposed at a wide area scope by an M2M gateway. The proposal aims at ensuring easy interoperability with ETSI M2M specifications, thus allowing remote applications to access the resources of ICN-enabled nodes. To showcase the viability of our proposal, a test-bed has been deployed leveraging low-cost devices for home automation. Experimental results confirm a good performance in terms of device resources consumption, easiness of implementation and latency of communication.